A modified approach of identification and tracking of heart boundary from MRI image sequences

Abstract

In the present work, a robust algorithm for automatic identification and segmentation of heart portion from cardiac Magnetic Resonance video Image (MRI) is presented. At first, an outline has been generated to get the region of interest (ROI) by employing the moving object criterion, which eventually reduces the processing time significantly. In the next step, Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm is used to segment the grey scale images into 5 distinct regions. This is done to make them more suitable for further processing and easy to use in the developed software. Finally Level set algorithm added with automatic contour generation module is used for tracking the exact heart boundary to segment it out from the rest of the image. This algorithm gives equally persistent result for both long axis and shot axis cardiac MRI data consisting of a movie (in AVI format) containing 32 separate frames of grayscale images.